


is always at zero

by Indices



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: Dreams, M/M, Snow Queen Elements, Temporary Amnesia, general weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:33:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24724597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indices/pseuds/Indices
Summary: You lose yourself in the snow, and find something in return.
Relationships: Robert Bumaro/Grand Karcist Ion (SCP Foundation)
Kudos: 15





	is always at zero

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to [Ori_Cat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ori_Cat/pseuds/Ori_Cat) for beta-ing!
> 
> Content warning for mild gore and potential consent issues arising from temporary amnesia/obfuscation of identity.
> 
> Edit: Rating change because of the above warnings. Nothing explicit is actually depicted, but I thought this might be more fitting.

In these halls the walls are ice, and the floors are ice, and the air tastes like silence. Where your knees touch the floor they feel riveted, as though by iron bolts. Your skin has long gone numb.

(If this is death, it is a cold blue heaven to which you’ve been consigned.)

You are putting something together. Something unimaginably vast, yet small enough to hold in your hands and coax the parts into place, just so.

This is familiar, the routine. Almost a comfort. The repetitive motions, the minutiae, the absolute focus. Some manner of transcendence. Move this piece here, and that over there, and then—

Steam, in the air.

Or… breath?

You look down. 

You are breathing. And your fingers are bleeding. 

Flesh sticks to metal at this temperature, but you should not be flesh. You pull away and the skin rips and dangles from your hand in an unsightly shade of red.

(You’re dreaming, aren’t you?)

And then, suddenly, you aren’t. 

You are lying somewhere warm, with the smell of smoke in the air. Someone is humming: a muted, steady melody, like the beat of hooves on a winter morning. When you turn on your side you can see the fire, and a figure before it, stirring something in a small pot. It’s too dark to make out their features. 

”You’re awake.” The voice is low and sure, like an arrow that you know will hit the target. A voice you want to trust, some would say. 

(You do not know what _you_ would say.)

“I came here to find something,” you hear yourself say. As if from a distance. 

And then, an afterthought. “Where am I?”

The figure sets down the pot. There is a spot of sky, just above the fire at the center of the tent. When they move, the moonlight that filters down throws their face into sharp relief.

It is pale. Paler than yours, you think at first. But then, there is a jolt of dissonance—should you have skin at all? Discreetly, you glance at your hand. Yes, there it is. The epidermis—organic—and the limb it is attached to. A wave of nausea.

To distract yourself, you look back up. The man has an ordinary face. Shorter than you, possibly, though your position makes it difficult to tell. Only that thick mane of sableblack hair makes him look the slightest bit feral. With hair like that he could be a murderer, or somebody’s folk hero. You suppose it makes little difference, for you.

“Sápmi, dear stranger.”

Is it? You have heard of this place, though you don’t remember how or when. But another question seems more pressing: how did you get here? And—

“Do you know who I am?” you ask.

It is a genuine question. You have pieces, but not all, and they’re scattered meaninglessly in your mind. 

(When you close your eyes you see the image of an anvil. The brilliant, white-hot pain of something molten down your throat. Your body, smelted down atom by atom and reassembled in the heart of the star firing behind your ribs. And then the numbness. Scenes from someone else’s life. You feel deep in your too-liquid heart that it should instead be something metallic, but you would not be able to say why.)

"I’m afraid,” says the man, with an apologetic tilt of the head, “that I haven’t the slightest clue.”

You look at him for a bit longer. “Why are you here?”

”Same as you. I came here to find something, a long time ago.”

”And did you ever find it?”

He smiles, neither friendly nor maliciously, eyes drifting from you. The echo of something old and voracious swims into view behind them, and then out again. 

“Oh, I don’t think I did.”

You dream that you are in a village square, in midwinter, on the longest night of the year. And you are young again. In your waking memory—if you could remember—there would be fading scenes of a home among the olive groves, atop the foothills of some distant island. 

Here there is only the future, a sky full of stars stretching out ahead of you.

This is not your home. It is far too cold to be. You huddle before the fire, careful not to burn your fingers. On the other side is a boy around your age with eyes that glitter black in the firelight.

”You know,” he says, eyes fixed on the flames, “on the coldest night of the year, they choose someone to give to the fire.”

”Here?” you hear yourself ask.

”No, we are used to the cold.” He looks up, then. Straight at you. For a second you see nothing but the dark in those eyes, like bottled night. “But you were running from that, weren’t you?”

For that you have no reply, save this: “And how was I chosen?”

He grins. “By drawing lots.”

You blink awake. “That didn't happen.”

“What didn’t?” the man replies, absently, ladling out something into two bowls. 

“I chose it freely.”

You feel as though that should mean something to you, but the moment you utter them, the words sound like something read from a script. A flutter of urgency somewhere in the back of your mind, gone in an instant.

“You’re feverish.” He passes you a bowl. “Eat.” Command and persuasion twine together in that voice. The voice of someone accustomed to wielding both.

You stare down into the bowl. The broth is light brown, with chunks of something floating in it. Meat—though for some reason you’d expected something redder, thicker.

It fails to stop revulsion from crawling up your gorge. You shake your head. 

The man tilts his own, bemused. He gestures at his own bowl. “It's only reindeer.” 

He lifts it to his mouth, sips, and swallows. Not a single drop spills. Your eyes follow the line of that pale throat as it moves. 

The feeling of hunger is strange to you. It starts as a pang in the stomach, a twisting, and then a dull emptiness that stretches on and on. Suddenly, this body disgusts you. Outside the tent’s door-flap you can barely make out a line of blinding white, and the urge to pick yourself up and fling yourself into it is overwhelming. 

It would remind you of the coolness of metal. Of the fixed, mechanical drumbeat of your heart. Of reality.

The man sighs.

“You'll die, you know."

You dream of a man whose body you had scrapped. Or whose name you had taken for yourself. 

Either way—you are seated in simple chairs, facing each other in the center of someplace dusty and claustrophobic. A basement, perhaps. A lightbulb hangs between you; the glare obscures his face. 

When he speaks, it is unnaturally calm. Nothing like the panicked rambling of... last time. The only time you had spoken. “You would have done the same, in my place.”

You regard him neutrally. “Why do you say that?”

He ignores that. “When I was a young man in Zaragoza, they commended me for my skill. At eighteen I was inducted as Inventor-Faithful, the youngest in my diocese.” Beyond the light, his lenses shine balefully. “ _Everything_ I did, I did for Him. What right did you have, to take it all away?”

“You made an error. A costly one.” You tilt your head to the side. “Good intentions are admirable. But for one of your position, there must be accountability. Intentions, on their own, are not enough.”

“Evidently.” The man whose name you have adopted adjusts his glasses. “You call yourself a _prophet_ , but what have you done for the Church, through all these years?”

You turn your head to look up at the light. Straight into the bulb of it. It doesn’t hurt, though perhaps it ought to. “I waited.”

(Perhaps it ought to burn away all trace of you.)

“Without my name, just who do you suppose yourself to be?” He leans forward, showing all of his face: its cleft chin and receding hairline, as human and ordinary as anyone else. And on it, the indignant expression.

In your head is a little voice that says, _this is the difference between you and him._ He can afford to be indignant, to be flawed. To rage, to weep, to make mistakes that end in death and horror. And you cannot hate him for it—but you can never be him, either. _That_ alone is your charge. In all its simplicity, its serendipity, its terrifying gravity.

“A servant of the Goddess. No more, and no less,” you say.

With a sigh, you place a hand on Bumaro's shoulder, and his image crumbles into dust. 

You come back to warmth, to semi-reality. 

Perhaps the echoes of something else still ring in your mind, because a question occurs to you. “...What is your name?”

The man in the tent looks at you curiously, as though startled by the question. And then, he smiles. A wistful, measured smile, more to himself than you. 

“Jänn.”

“Are you certain?”

He raises his eyebrows. “Why, whatever else?”

Again in the palace of ice, over the frozen lake, assembling what you had been. 

It’s missing something, and you wonder if that mightn’t have been inside you all along, if you will have to claw out the remnants of that quicksilver from your veins until your arm goes limp and your fingers move no longer. 

You would do it. This is the only certainty that you have known for all your life, that you must put this together. You have tasted all the weight of patience (and seen your world at its end, and killed before you died, and lost and lost until you lost yourself) but you _will_ see it done.

_My poor child._

_One cannot spell eternity with merely these pieces._

You freeze. The voice is lovely: chiming and methodical, a symphony in the pure notes of machinery. But it sounds like the echo of a faraway song, transmitted across immense distances, the churning of gigantic gearworks through space and time. Already fading.

You look up, clasping your hands. If you were not already kneeling, then you would fall to your knees.

_Please. I have kept your secrets for three thousand years. Just this once, I beg an answer._

Through one of the windows, high up near the parapets, a beam of sunlight streams in. Water drips from the opening. Your puzzle, too, is melting.

_Why?_

No reply.

Beneath you, the ice begins to crack.

Upon waking you remember nothing but snowfall and the tinkling chords of ice. You are still very cold. On reflection, this may have something to do with the fact that you are trudging through a blizzard. 

At least you can see the tent: a brown speck in the distance, barely visible through the snow.

When at last you reach it you fling open the entrance-flap. Jänn glances up. 

“You look cold, stranger. Sit.”

He pats the spot next to him, on the woven mat. With no reason not to, you sit down beside him, folding your legs neatly underneath you. Out of the storm everything feels too warm, this close to the fire, as though your skin itself is ablaze.

The man looks you up and down. “And remove the tunic. It’ll be sodden once the snow melts.”

So you stand back up and shrug out of the garment. The linen feels soaked through. How you had survived wearing only this should be a wonder, but with the number of inexplicable things that have already happened, it barely registers in your mind. When you are finished, you set it aside and sit back down in your previous position.

Wordlessly he picks up one of your hands; turns it over between his own. They are smaller than yours, with thin clever fingers and rounded, human nails. Featherings of hair trail up to the place where the shadows of his sleeves swallow them, and his fingers give off heat as they rasp against your skin.

After feeling nothing but numbness for so long, the sensation is too much. You flinch and draw back.

“Not frostbite, then. But you are very cold.” He looks up, from the hand to your face. “Do you still feel it? The cold?”

“No.” But then, the thing that still stiffens your limbs and wracks you to the core with minute shivers must be the cold. “Yes. It’s nothing—” _Nothing serious_ , you were going to say, but a shudder aborts it, jolting your teeth with a hard chatter. Instinctively, you wrap your arms around yourself.

“Is it?” says the man, faintly amused. “Dear stranger, you are endlessly confounding.” Then, a thoughtful look passes through his eyes. “There is a way that I could be of aid. If you would permit it.”

The frost from your eyelashes has begun to melt, and you must blink away the water to see him clearly. 

“What is it?”

“This,” he says, lifting one edge of the cloth draped around his shoulders. He adds, unnecessarily, “You needn’t fear. There is enough room.”

(It is only rational that you do not fear. What cause do you have to fear this man, slight and ordinary, sitting in this tent with his hides and such banal concern in those eyes? Yet there is something else that rolls off of him in waves, choking the air like oil in water. _Power_. The thought comes suddenly—he must be so accustomed as to be oblivious. And you? No, you are used to a life of endless wandering and ironclad duty, of secrets that hold within them the weight of millennia. If you ever held any power, it would not have been the kind to make others bow their heads or listen or even love you.)

You nod once, curtly, and shift yourself into the space he has created, so that the two of you sit shoulder to shoulder. He is smaller than you, but the warmth pours from him like a furnace, even through the layers of his clothing. 

And then he reaches over; takes your hand back into his. He massages the warmth back into its joints before moving onto the other.

“You were a smith, I think,” he muses, staring not at you but straight ahead, or in the direction of something far away. “In my time I have met a number of those, and the calluses match if nothing else.”

It is unnerving to be this close to a person, with so much of your skin exposed. His hair is in your face. The smell of wood smoke, and then, beneath it, something else. A sharp tang, like ozone or iron oxide. You want to brush it aside, but that would mean touching him of your own will, and that would be—no. Your skin prickles, flushed with the heat of the fire and with him. Part of you wants to crawl out of it and fling yourself bodily into the freezing winds, the way you’d felt when he had raised the bowl to his lips and drank, the column of his throat stuttering up in time with your pulse. Another part wants to burn. 

“How can you be so sure,” you ask, forcing your voice into tonelessness.

(You know you’d learned to do that long ago, after you had been reprimanded for whining, or raising your voice. But the memory—the precise one, in sound and form and color—swims out of reach, the moment that you think of this.)

“Oh, but I cannot. Not anymore.” No longer so soft-spoken, he makes a harsh sound from the back of his throat. Not quite laughter. “That is the crux of things, is it not?”

His eyes move before his face, darting over to yours, to see the way that you are looking at him—and the horror seizes you, _he knows._ But all there is in those eyes is a deep tiredness, a well of sorrow. He turns to you.

“My, what a sorry pair we make.” He sighs, so quietly that its only indication is the brush of breath against your face. “By now you've lived for longer. But in all those years... I wonder if you have ever allowed yourself to want something just for the sake of it, just once.”

When it happens you can only find the mind to think that his eyes are grey instead of black, as you had thought. It was only that the firelight had danced in them so artfully that all color had been lost, flame-eaten, like the death throes of a star that drags into itself light-years of the surrounding matter. 

His mouth tastes of blood.

You float on your back, on the once-frozen lake. Meltwater trickles softly from the ceiling.

Some of it lands in the water. Some on your face.

In the morning, if there is a morning at all, you will be the first to wake. You think _if_ because it would mean that you had let everything go unquestioned in the diffuse way of dreams and drowned yourself in those eyes, their vault of ancient griefs, the pull of the unknown and the too-human warmth of them.

But suppose there is a morning. After you dress, you will sit at the entrance of the tent and watch the sun come up. A sheen of ice will have formed over the snowfields, and it will glitter a fierce, bleeding ruby.

“Have you ever wondered what lies there? On the other side of that sunrise?” the strange man will ask, unprompted. You will not be able to see him, but you’ll know him to be there, peering out from over your shoulder. “That was what I came here to find.”

A pause. “Do you remember, now? What you came here for?”

And you will—

You will exhale, your breath ghosting in the air.

You wake up.

**Author's Note:**

> My thought process: what if instead of writing something with an actual plot and coherent themes, I wrote a surreal dream-within-a-dream with the vaguest possible allusions to "The Snow Queen"? _Very_ loosely starring Ion as Gerda, "Bumaro" as Kai, and Mekhane as the eponymous _Snedronningen_. Except less... villainous. 
> 
> Title from R. S. Thomas, "Reflections."
> 
> ("A mirror’s temperature / is always at zero. It is ice / in the veins. Its camera / is an X-ray.")


End file.
